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Tonight at 8:00 at the Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt I'll be talking with Ed Halter about his book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (Thunder's Mouth Press/Avalon, 2006), covering a range of topics rather pertinent to what has been called either World War III or World War IV, depending on whether you're listening to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich or former CIA director James Woolsey. These include, most centrally, America's Army, a realistic game developed by the military as both a recruiting and training tool, but also combat simulators flacked at high tech trade shows, behaviorist game designers concerned with "making memories" in players, Americans blowing away virtual Bin Ladens after 9/11, games such as "Under Ash" and "Under Siege" marketed to the "Arab Street," and American activist/left hacks of violent games. The announcement for the event is a here; earlier posts about the evening are here and here. I hope to see you there.
8:00 pm
BookCourt
163 Court Street
Brooklyn NY 11201
map and directions
Highly recommended: video by Oliver Laric [Quicktime .mov] titled 787 Cliparts, via the Rhizome.org blog. It's 787 frames of generic cartoon line drawings (known as "clip art" from the days when people used scissors) blended together into a stop-motion animation. The flow is quite dazzling and lyrical. It recalls the Aeon Flux episode "Chronophasia," where Aeon becomes unstuck in time and transforms into hundreds of historical characters, rapidly changing costumes and hairstyles, as she walks across the room. And it's a vast improvement over the rather nauseating "scramble suit" in Richard Linklater's misbegotten A Scanner Darkly. (Prediction: 14 years from now Linklater will release a director's cut of that film restoring all the live action footage he shot, and do a big mea culpa for burying Robert Downey Jr. and all the great Philip K. Dick dialogue behind an obnoxious Photoshop filter. One cries for what that film could have been. Downey is a perfect Barris and the "sitting around the crash pad" scenes are as hilarious as they are in the book.)
Also recommended: Satellite Jockey's "Low Pressure (Sound) System Mix" [18 min / 20 mb .mp3], consisting of the geosat/bleepcentric pieces below. Gritty, sonically stimulating, often quite pretty:
1. Vladmir Ussachevsky - Wireless Fantasy
2. Kaffe Matthews - She could
3. Kid 606 - Site Specific Sound Installation
4. Alva Noto - 06-f117.tiff
5. Fennesz - Before I Leave
6. AGF - Loading
Better get it fast, SJ (aka Rick Silva) is notorious for removing great material from the web right after he posts it.
Ed Halter, whose book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games we'll be discussing at BookCourt in Brooklyn tomorrow night (y'all come!), referred me to this discussion at Henry Jenkins' blog about video game criticism and the topic of "why don't games have their Lester Bangs or Pauline Kael?" You could substitute "electronic/digital art and music" for games in that discussion and most of it would be relevant: that the critics will emerge in a generation from the ranks of kids consuming the products now, that criticism does exist but mostly on blogs and chatboards and not the established print publications, etc. Games have a different problem in their climb to mainstream acceptance, which is that, as one commenter pointed out, the experience varies so much from one consumer/player to another--and not just for the usual reasons of "the squishy subjectivity of art" but because the game has decision trees that could result in completely unlike experiences for the novice and the advanced player. In an earlier post I described the pleasures of watching my nephews playing Super Mario 64. They're experts so I got more out of being a spectator than I ever would have gotten as an inept player. The "game art" Halter describes in his book that I think I'd like best are the pieces that take apart the games and reassemble the fragments as "objects of contemplation," for example, Workspace Unlimited's Diplomatic Arena, which consists of world leaders and villains indiscriminately slaughtering each other to a montage soundtrack. Some earlier thoughts of mine on the "problem of interactivity" are here and here.